Tracking pre-school progress in Cambridgeshire

Sentinel has provided an online system that is enhancing the development of pre-school children across Cambridgeshire.

Commissioned by Cambridgeshire County Council, the digital online data system enables Early Years providers to record and share assessments for the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and Every Child a Talker.

Known as CASEY (Cambridgeshire’s assessment system for Early Years) the system facilitates the secure, real-time sharing of information between providers and the authority.

Aggregated data for single and multiple settings is visible to local authority advisers and children centre managers via specially-designed dashboards.

Offering an effective means of evidencing progress and ensuring more children are ready for school, the system enhances providers’ understanding and helps them manage their service.

Further benefits include:

- Providers evidence progress better and understand which children are making progress and which not, and in what areas of learning

- Providers are better equipped to measure the development and meet the needs of children in receipt of enhanced and targeted funding, such as children in receipt of the Early Years Pupil Premium

- Providers have an additional independent source of evidence to support their self-evaluation which can be used in managing their service, reporting to parents and in conversations with Ofsted

- Children’s centres have access to aggregated and more detailed data on progress and outcomes, enabling more effective targeting of resources

- Local authorities can set benchmarks based on their own expectations for children's development at a particular age

Sentinel director, Graham McCusker, said: “This is a project that really demonstrates what our solutions can do. On-line assessment forms make data capture more efficient and ensure higher data quality, while the data integration power of our Data Hub is able to share this information in a controlled way to those council teams who need to be able to see timely, aggregated information.”